My Role

UX Researcher

City employees without prior IT knowledge have a difficult time understanding the flow, content, and language of the homepage and Request Offerings (RO) on the IT Service Hub. This  causes users to deviate from using the IT Service Hub and choose to call the IT help desk for support.

“I am unable to find what I need!”

Through interviews, usability testing, and iterations, I developed voice and tone in order to translate the language to be more user-centric. My team redesigned the homepage format, changed icons, color pallet and filers. All of these changes improved the average score of user experience on the System Usability Scale by 49.3%.

User experience improved by 49.3%

My team was commissioned by the City of Seattle to evaluate and improve the language and user experience of their IT Service Management System (ITSM).

Our client’s goals were to improve the intuitive nature of the IT Service Hub homepage, develop a client-centric nomenclature to guide users in finding what they need, and explore new colors, icons and filters that fit the mental models of the 13,000 users.

I utilized my experience in ethnography to develop my research strategy on this project. I wanted to explore the personal side of the users I was working with before I started with interviews, which I found allowed users to relax and open up. 

To establish a baseline user experience and gage expectations I had five screened users with tangential experience using internal management.

To test language simplification we had users been exposed to the service hub but have had tangential experience with other internal Management systems. I had five individuals test the original prototype. I also had one Amazon employee test the system as they have also used internal ticketing systems for work.    

I developed a brand voice informed by the comparative and competitive analysis of other internal management systems and customer facing help desks. As our users are feeling unheard and that the service hub is too hard to use, I wanted the language to establish trust, be clear, concise, helpful, and receptive. This allowed us to create a structure for rewriting the ROs to test with.

Thoughtful: A balance between formal titles and informative descriptions.

Simple & Direct: Writing is straight-forward and easy to understand.

Deliberate & Consistent: Words are used intentionally and users can count on the language provided to inform them.

By changing the language of the platform from IT-centric to client-centric, more users will be able to find what they want in the service catalog as the experience becomes more intuitive. Thus, this change will encourage users to use the tool by increasing user familiarity and learnability. 

City employees without prior IT knowledge have a difficult time understanding the language of the Request Offerings (RO), which causes them to deviate from using the IT Service Hub.

From our findings and the characteristics of our users, I developed a persona to humanize our users. This helped communicate our findings to the client as well.

I created a storyboard to illustrate the emotional arc users experience when using the IT Service Hub.

To establish a baseline with five users I created two task scenarios based on the most common used Request offerings. I wanted to explore the flow, expectations, and frustrations users face with the provided prototype.

The primary findings for the IT Service Hub Homepage and Service Catalog were:
Inadequate Search Function 

“I cannot find what I am searching for because I only know the ballpark of what I need.”

The search function was inadequate because the metadata in the search index was not built out and did not match users’ mental models when they are searching for what they need.
Validated that the language is not user centric or intuitive enough for them to accomplish their tasks smoothly.
Users have different interpretations of the word standard which causes confusion.
Ultimately, users cannot find the right service that they need and opt for calling.

Beyond the issues of language, users are facing several other challenges with the IT Services that they felt diminished their trust in the system. I felt it was important to outline these additional pain points:

To evaluate the changes in language, I wrote up two task scenarios. The first task was designed to test the language and comprehension of how users experience finding the software they need. The second task was designed to test the confusions users were facing with requesting access to the City Network when working remotely.

After the prototype was completed I tested the language changes with 9 users.

To understand how well we solved the users problems with the IT Service Hub we calculated the average success rate of our two task scenarios.

Overall for the first task we had a 25% success rate for users. This means that 75% of the users were unable or stopped trying to finish their task.

For the second task 37.5% of users were successful which indicates that we have a long road ahead of us. It was important to note that we did not have an active search function in the prototype and the filters were not built out. With these elements completed the user may have an easier time finding what they need.

To measure our success in improving the users experience we used the System Usability Scale.

We first established a baseline score with the five original users with the preliminary prototype. The baseline experience for users was on average 22.5%.
To give context to this score, on an academic grading scale it would be an F and ultimately not an acceptable experience.

After we implemented our changes to color, icons, and language and tested with seven users, the usability scores averaged 71.8%, which would on an academic scale would be a high C and falls in the acceptable margin.
We have made great strides in changing the user experience, but it also means there is a long way to go.